#131 Robert Friedland (Billionaire Miner)

**David Senra** (0:00)
With typical impatience, he had been searching for a shortcut.
Promoting a stock is like making a movie, Friedland said. You've got to have stars, props, and a good script.
Lately, good scripts had been hard to come by. Friedland's reputation as a daring penny stock promoter with a mightest touch was unraveling with the collapse of his high-flying gold mining company, Galactic Resources.
Thirteen months earlier, Galactic had sought bankruptcy protection in the wake of pollution and regulatory problems at its Colorado gold mine.
The US. Environmental Protection Agency was billing the Colorado mine as one of the country's worst environmental mining disasters, and the US. Justice Department had launched a criminal investigation.
Compounding matters, Friedland's backup script, a hot gold play in Venezuela, was on its last legs.
Most major investors already shunned the 43-year-old mining promoter, and now he was marooned in the middle of nowhere with a handful of his remaining adherents.
This is a historic occasion, he began.
They used to shoot people who entered the territory. Now you are part of a select group that has been allowed in.
We are very proud of the company that has brought you here.
In the year since Diamond Fields was founded, we have accomplished a great deal.
We now have two diamond mines and the marine concession you see before you.
These are the building blocks for a great major mining company. Friedland sprang to his feet and began to work the crowd, moving deftly from table to table. He quickly assumed an easy familiarity with his guests, then launched into a passionate and impressive sounding discussion of the area's diamond potential.
By the time this stuff hits the water, 90%, do you hear me? Nine zero is going to be gem quality and over one carat. He gestured c-word and the diamonds are there, just lying on the gravel waiting for us to suck them up.
Robert Friedland had won his visitors.
Jean Boll, for one, wasn't surprised. In his short year and a half with The Charming American, he had learned that there was nothing Friedland could not sell. That was an excerpt from the book that I'm going to talk to you about today, which is The Big Score. Robert Friedland and The Voisey's Bay Hustle. And it was written by Jacquie McNish. So this is another example of a book I didn't know existed. It was recommended to me by a listener. So let's not waste any time. Let's jump right into the book. I want to tell you something I wish I knew up front when I read it. So the title, The Big Score. What does that mean? This book is fundamentally about Robert Friedland having a mining company that accidentally discovers the largest nickel deposit in, I think, North American history. And he winds up selling that, even though he invests, I think, less than a million dollars up front. He winds up selling that for $4.1 billion. And so the book is about how this happens. But the reason I think this is the right time to do this book right now is because next week I'm going to start a multiple part series. And a listener turned me on to the fact that there's multiple books on Edwin Land that I have not yet covered. So back on Founders Number 40, I did one podcast on Edwin Land based on two books I read about him and the company he founded Polaroid. So the reason I bring that up now and how this relates to Robert is because Edwin Land was the single most influential person in regards to how Steve Jobs created Apple, right? And as we're going to see, Robert Friedland and Steve Jobs temporarily were friends when they were both at Reed College and we're going to see Robert's influence on Steve a little bit as well. Okay, so I want to get right into it. I want to talk about Robert's early life and then his arrest selling acid, selling LSD. So it says Robert Friedland had attracted attention all of his life, but it was at the age of 19 that he found his first big audience. On the morning, on one March morning in 1970, as he sat in a van in a parking lot of a shopping center in Portland, Maine, a somber group of middle-aged men in dark suits and narrow ties surrounded the college sophomore.
They identified themselves as federal agents, grabbed his arms and locked handcuffs over his wrists.
Despite being shackled and flanked by two grim-faced detectives as he was later led to jail, the thin young man with long wavy blonde hair still managed to flash a brilliant smile for a photographer from the Portland Press Herald. Friedland grinned as if he had just won an award, but the prize handed down in February 1971 consisted of a two-year jail sentence for unlawfully selling drugs. Police confiscated more than 24,000 tablets of LSD valued at $125,000. So the newspaper, this is a quote from the newspaper article at the time, it says, The former star athlete and outstanding student was one of three young men arrested in a large interstate narcotics ring investigation. Friedland insists to this day that his time in jail was a miscarriage of justice, typical of the corrupt Nixon administration. Those direct quotes from Robert. Like many college students of his generation, he experimented with drugs, including LSD, and he vigorously protested the Vietnam War. Echoing Timothy Leary's notion that drugs were an agent of change that would free the world from such stupidities as the Vietnam War, Friedland recalls, another direct quote from him, We honestly thought that if everyone took LSD, the Vietnam War would stop the judge sentenced Friedland to prison because he said, The court is satisfied that you were the principal in this affair and that you took the role of leadership in this transaction. So that's an important part I wanted to highlight because not only is he doing that when he's selling LSD, when he's, you know, what, 18, 19, 20 years old, but he's also in every single transaction in business, definitely taking the lead.